Lottery is a joke.

[UkcsAlias]

On one hand, you got a thread with people saying "45 days is too much time for the demolition timer; houses should be for people who play every day".

Ignore those people, they arent aware of many real world situations that could otherwise severely harm. Its very common for someone to be sent away for 4 week for work. Big projects can easily demand this (and this might only be demanded like once per 5 years). And that means 28 days in which you cannot log in (dont rely on internet in all countries. plenty of countries barely have enough speed to even just open a basic website). Its better to have a timer that is 2 weeks too long, than to have a timer that is lacking 1 day. Sure, it might mean a house isnt used for 1.5 months, but otherwise you can end up with a house that was used every single day getting demolished because of random events.

4 months on that is however excessive on the other side though... as thats a severe waste of resources from that point on. And while in theory the argument can still work, the problem at that point is that you can then always throw in coma as an argument. A limit has to be set. Using practical cases and have a fair margin with it is on that the most decent solution. For that i would say 6 weeks is fair (42 days, and with an additional weekend we can have that 45 days).

For arguments about the cycle, i would also look at acceptable situations irl. Some people are put in shifts and by that simply arent capable of logging in every day. For example you can have people shift position every week. Making them unable to log in every other week. Yet during the week they log in, they are very active (because thats a week they dont need to work in at all). Note that for these people an extended lottery cycle can be very graceful. They might still miss some cycles, but the chance of overlap is at least there. Which if every cycle was only 3 days. They would miss out on far too many cycles to allow any decent competition.

[Zaruku]

45 days is a very reasonable time. While it provides incentive for the player to maintain their sub, it's also just enough time for an average gamer to take time off for whatever reason for their subs.

[Naoki34]

Housing used to be a joke for workers who, unless they had the means to get a good connection and a good laptop, could only think: "Damn, there's no housing available!"

It was probably like the Ps5 scalpers.


Either you could log on quickly and run to your favourite plot and hope to get your house, with the happiness of a server crash as everyone wanted their house.

Or, manage to buy a house quickly within 30 minutes, everything was gone.

It was a great time!

Well now, you play the lottery, but it's like trying to loot your Ex mount, you'll get it one day, at least it's not never for a certain group of players... Yes, I'm sure you know the ones who are not No Life!

[SXTC]

It is called fair. It feels bad because you don't have an advantage anymore. All your ideas make the lottery not fair and defeats the purpose of adding it.

Lets put things in perspective here. Before you had to compete with gil sellers that wanted to get as much houses as possible to resell and all of them used scripts... however several other people also used scripts so they wouldn't have to be behind their pc to get it (those scripts press plaque's faster then you can). When lottery came... the use of a script became absolute so SE took care of that true... however we are forgetting those gil sellers have a vast amount of accounts & subscriptions they use to play in the lottery which still gives them an unfair benefit, especially with the housing shortage. I think this problem can only be solved SE made instanced wards in which case no one would still want to buy a house from a gil seller knowing houses would become infinite (but you could only have 1 for private use and 1 for FC use per character). How this would work? I'll make a post about it now.

[UkcsAlias]

Lets put things in perspective here. Before you had to compete with gil sellers that wanted to get as much houses as possible to resell and all of them used scripts... however several other people also used scripts so they wouldn't have to be behind their pc to get it (those scripts press plaque's faster then you can). When lottery came... the use of a script became absolute so SE took care of that true... however we are forgetting those gil sellers have a vast amount of accounts & subscriptions they use to play in the lottery which still gives them an unfair benefit, especially with the housing shortage. I think this problem can only be solved SE made instanced wards in which case no one would still want to buy a house from a gil seller knowing houses would become infinite (but you could only have 1 for private use and 1 for FC use per character). How this would work? I'll make a post about it now.

The real solution here would be being far more active at taking care of bots. Housing is not the only area where they matter. Currently the detection on this is pathetic. Spam bots for RMT can spam for hours while their messages should be detected within minutes, indicating even a simple lack of checking.

The other issue is excessive grandfathering mainly benefitting those resellers as it means they have less accounts to maintain with cash. The more accounts they need, the more money they at least bring in. And with proper bot detection, those accounts will have to be inactive for quite a big amount of time (because otherwise after detection they will also lose the house). While the money costs can be compensated into their RMT pricing, it still makes it less likely to sell as prices have to go up significantly (instead of 1 account owning 8 houses, if it owns only 1, it means 8x the sub costs already. and their RMT price has to go up equaly). This makes even less people likely to buy, and can hurt their sales.

The more money those botters have to spend, the more money SE gets, which motivates their team to become even better at detecting, to get more money out of it again. Botters wont stop, unless the costs become too high to maintain. At which point SE basicly won. The measurements then will last for a while, and once botters found a way again, the cycle repeats.

But the real problem is, as long as botting isnt truly a problem, they essentialy just generate money. And currently as SE is barely reacting, it feels like this is the case. The other advantage of delayed bans is that it makes it harder for botters to find out what the detection pattern is. But at the same time, botters already have dump acounts, since its much cheaper to have a bot paid for 1 month, and have the trial month for free, and then ditch the bot and making another one catch up. They can just transfer the gil to the next one (in a less efficient way to avoid detection, but it still passes on the value).

[SXTC]

The real solution here would be being far more active at taking care of bots. Housing is not the only area where they matter. Currently the detection on this is pathetic. Spam bots for RMT can spam for hours while their messages should be detected within minutes, indicating even a simple lack of checking.

The other issue is excessive grandfathering mainly benefitting those resellers as it means they have less accounts to maintain with cash. The more accounts they need, the more money they at least bring in. And with proper bot detection, those accounts will have to be inactive for quite a big amount of time (because otherwise after detection they will also lose the house). While the money costs can be compensated into their RMT pricing, it still makes it less likely to sell as prices have to go up significantly (instead of 1 account owning 8 houses, if it owns only 1, it means 8x the sub costs already. and their RMT price has to go up equaly). This makes even less people likely to buy, and can hurt their sales.

The more money those botters have to spend, the more money SE gets, which motivates their team to become even better at detecting, to get more money out of it again. Botters wont stop, unless the costs become too high to maintain. At which point SE basicly won. The measurements then will last for a while, and once botters found a way again, the cycle repeats.

But the real problem is, as long as botting isnt truly a problem, they essentialy just generate money. And currently as SE is barely reacting, it feels like this is the case. The other advantage of delayed bans is that it makes it harder for botters to find out what the detection pattern is. But at the same time, botters already have dump acounts, since its much cheaper to have a bot paid for 1 month, and have the trial month for free, and then ditch the bot and making another one catch up. They can just transfer the gil to the next one (in a less efficient way to avoid detection, but it still passes on the value).

If the problem was that easy to solve they would have shut out bots already but scammers always find a way to take abuse. No point trying to plug a hole that is impossible to plug.
What SE could do however is adjust the beginner quests for new characters so they cannot venture outside of town until they do a quest first where they are given a random number that they have to answer manually to another NPC.
This forces bot owners to have to do the quests manually, making it harder for them to get their bots running in larger quantities. There are plenty of easy fixes to screw them over and discourage the behaviour.

[Amenara]

I think this problem can only be solved SE made instanced wards in which case no one would still want to buy a house from a gil seller knowing houses would become infinite (but you could only have 1 for private use and 1 for FC use per character). How this would work? I'll make a post about it now.

You will find very few people who disagree with this statement. Instanced housing fixes all of the supply issues (assuming the instancing is setup so everyone can have at least 1 house) and removes the RMT problem in housing unless you want a specific house in a ward for some reason I suppose.

[Jojoya]

The real solution here would be being far more active at taking care of bots. Housing is not the only area where they matter. Currently the detection on this is pathetic. Spam bots for RMT can spam for hours while their messages should be detected within minutes, indicating even a simple lack of checking.

You honestly think they're going to hire the amount of staff that would be needed to manually monitor every world's chat channels 24/7 for bot spam?

They've already got some auto-detection in place. That's why the bot spam messages are so strangely phrased. They're trying to bypass detection. Eventually SE finds something within the current phrasing they can add to auto-detection to clear the spam messages without impacting player communication. The bots then find some new phrasing to use.

Countering bots is not a simple matter. As programming gets more sophisticated, the easier it becomes to get bots to imitate actual player behavior. SE can't go too far in enacting counter measures or the game experience of normal players ends up impacted. New World has been a hot mess of examples of developers trying to fix exploits and counter bots without thought for the consequences.

Want to get rid of bots? Get rid of those who buy from bots. If they don't have buyers, they stop making money and have to give up to go someplace they can.

Most housing sale RMT has nothing to do with bots by the way. True that bots used to get used for placard camping but lottery has taken that out of the equation. They may even be used to spam advertising on RMT friendly Discords and websites. But any actual sale has to be handled manually. In the end, it's opportunists taking advantage of a highly desired but limited resource to make money and the role bots can play in the process is so small there's little point in using them.

There would be no housing RMT if SE went to a system where every player could get what they want without having to fight against other players. SE could increase the number of wards on every world to 36 and that should more than enough on every world to give every player who wants a house a plot (Balmung and Mateus being possible exceptions). We'd still have RMT in housing. Why? Because there would still be players who want and can afford the medium and large plots and there wouldn't be enough of those to go around. Because there are still players who will get multiple houses because the system lets them and there's gil to be made through gardens and workshops.

To all those who say improving the instanced housing to include houses is not possible or will not work, give us examples of the MMOs that use it where the the player base has the same drama we have here about access to a house. Give us links to their housing forums posts where players are angry that they can't get a house.

[Sotaris]

Housing used to be a joke for workers who, unless they had the means to get a good connection and a good laptop, could only think: "Damn, there's no housing available!"

Not really. Just need a ssd. We knew when wards would become available so again if housing was important, plan accordingly.

[Sotaris]

Well now, you play the lottery, but it's like trying to loot your Ex mount, you'll get it one day, at least it's not never for a certain group of players... Yes, I'm sure you know the ones who are not No Life!

Some people won’t due to limit supply. If there is no houses you can’t enter a lottery.